Hewlett-Packard is pushing four new ProLiant servers destined for the wiring closets of mid-sized businesses. According to HP's Proliant marketing director John Gromala, the new systems will revamp the company's SMB gear with more compact systems and lower prices.

Figures from Complaints Direct put second-hand cars as the most complained about product in 2007, though mobile phone contracts came a close second, and mobile phone handsets managed a notable number four.

How many new and updated 45nm mobile microprocessors is Intel planning to launch alongside 'Montevina', the next generation of its Centrino laptop platform? It's going to launch 15, industry insiders claim. Count 'em...

A consortium of British and US military agencies and defense and aerospace firms have agreed a new standard for secure email. Security experts are watching the developments closely, but are unsure how much of the specification will make it into public use or commercial email security products.

AMD has confirmed that the release of two of its Phenom processors, the 9700 and the 9900, has slipped from this quarter to the next. It claimed the move had been made for marketing reasons not manufacturing issues.

Supermarket trolleys have always been pretty basic - until now. Microsoft is co-developing a new one featuring an integrated display that tells you what to buy, what aisle it’s in and how much you’ve spent.

In a further outre twist, the budding Japanese robot'n' exoskeleton industry plans to move into a new sector. Researchers in the land of the Rising Sun have exhibited a mighty powered suit which could see increasingly elderly farmers - lifespans prolonged indefinitely perhaps, by advancing medical technology - striding across the fields reaping crops and lifting heavy loads.

ReviewThe EVA8000 was a high-end product when it was announced, bundling HDMI with 1080P HD playback. But the video encoding world moves quickly. It may have been suitable when HD standards were emerging, but a few months later the situation looks decidedly different.

We're delighted to announce today that the world's favourite tat bazaar is offering members of its eBay Extra programme free cash to spend on purchases in the form of a "coupon", although the offer is evidently open to those in possession of a fully functioning time machine or lucky enough to live near a time-shifting wormhole:

US scientists have created a genetically-modified carrot which delivers a much higher dose of calcium than the bog-standard carrot and may help "ward off conditions such as brittle bone disease and osteoporosis", the BBC reports.

Two campaigners from anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd are "in custody" aboard Japanese whaling vessel the Yushin Maru 2 after boarding the ship in the Antarctic, the BBC reports. The pair were allegedly assaulted and tied to a radar mast during the action, Sea Shepherd claims.

The behind-the-scenes row between broadband providers and the record industry over filesharing has turned public, with internet trade association ISPA nominating the BPI for its "Villain of the Year" gong today.

Competition ResultsLast week, we reported the possibility that the lobby group that represents America's sound recording owners (RIAA) might merge with the global sound recording owners lobby group (IFPI). This raised the awful possibility that the Recording Industry Ass. of America would disappear - making all those "Boycott the RIAA"-type domains useless. Zut alors!

NASA today released Touch the Invisible Sky, a 60-page book using 28 embossed images from its Great Observatories, coupled with large-print and braille text to bring the "majestic images" to the visually-impaired and blind.

Topflight astrophysics boffins believe they may have cracked the tricky problem of how to make antimatter, which would be useful for many purposes: for instance powering relatively practical starships, or - of course - blowing up an entire planet in one go. However, it appears that making antimatter requires the possession of a black hole or a neutron star, so it won't be happening any time soon.

As the Macworld show starts in San Francisco Google has speeded up its iPhone applications, as well as improving its customised homepages and providing quick links to users' favourite Google applications.

Macworld ExpoApple has sold more than 4m iPhones since the handset was launched in June 2007, CEO Steve Jobs said today - an average of 20,000 a day, he said. That was a prelude to the announcement of the phone's latest firmware - and one for the iPod Touch that comes at a price

Macworld ExpoFor once the rumour mill was right. "There's something in the air," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. And then he hit us with the MacBook Air. It’s aluminium, has black keys, is super, super thin, and Steve held it easily with his fingertips.

Customers of the Los Angeles-based web hosting provider Dreamhost awoke to an unwelcome pang in their wallets today. A late-night accounting cock-up caused every customer to be charged a year's worth of truant payments when the wrong date was slipped in its automated billing program.

Radio RegMacWorld, MacWorld, MacWorld. Let those proprietary clowns play with their toys and false idols. We'll stick with open source decency - thank you very much - and dish out Episode 9 of Open Season.

All the investor capital jingling in VMware's pockets has given the virtualization giant a healthy appetite for acquisitions. VMware said today it's planning to buy Thinstall, an application virtualization software firm based in San Francisco for an undisclosed sum.

The convergence of PC and cellphone architectures has brought Intel and Qualcomm increasingly into conflict, and at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, both showed prototypes of their platforms for next generation mobile devices.

Macworld 2008Is Steve Jobs losing his mojo? Almost speechless by the end of his Macworld keynote, the Apple chief executive's "to-do-list" left little by way of the surprises or thrills legions of Jobs-loving fanboys have come to expect.